A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart, Michael Allen, Michael Allen, et al.

Book Overview

Revised and updated, this 15th anniversary edition of the #1 New York Times bestseller salutes America's true and proud history. Fifteen years ago, Professors Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen set... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1595230327
• ISBN13: 9781595230324
• Release Date: February 2007
• Publisher: Sentinel
• Length: 932 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.2" x 6.2" x 9.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Outstanding Compendium

Whether one is conservative, liberal, or somewhere in the lazy, hazy "middle," this book is an outstanding and very necessary addition to the wealth of contemporary U.S. historical surveys. While the authors (both university professors with doctorates) are very clear that they espouse conservative political viewpoints, their scholarship is not skewed, by any means. On the contrary, their conservative foundation seems to steer them in a direction based far more upon direct assessment of historical facts and far less upon the egregiously interpretative latitudes so often taken by leftist and revisionist historians. The result is a balanced survey that springs from a healthy, sober admiration for the American "identity," without a blind eye to America's faults...or to its great successes! How refeshing. Obviously, the authors' delineation and assessment of the New Deal, for example, will meet with disdain from dreamy leftist historians, but the professors again tackle this moment in US history within the sphere of the factual, rather than the interpretative. The work is scrupulously well-documented; citations abound and are appropriate in frequency for a book of this scope. Moreover, the work is eminently well-written--it steadily navigates a tightrope upon which the academic and the accessible are balanced simultaneously for the modern reader, without ever falling into the deathly middle-ground that can sometimes bog-down ambitious tomes of this sort. Buy it for yourself or a loved one and enjoyably refresh the brain cells, particularly at this current, crucial juncture in our history. The book is a "must" for any conservative library, of course, but it's so well-delineated and balanced that historians of any slant would be able to utilize it to significant and compelling effect. That's the great thing about the truth.

A valuable source book

An accurate and useful view of history can never be gotten from one single source. An accurate knowledge of history is crucial if we want to avoid making the same catastrophic mistakes over and over again. i.e. do you understand how Hitler gained power? Would you recognize the techniques if they were instituted here? If you doubt that American history has been rewritten, go to a used book store and find older books and compare them with books published after the 50s and 60s. Find out what has been excluded, whitewashed, distorted, spun or misrepresented. You can still do this. If you do not, your children may not be able to do so.

An excellent reference

This is an excellent reference and textbook. It provides a more balanced look at American History than many popular textbooks that seem to have an anti-American bias. This is the text that should be used in most of our history classes today. Every history teacher and school administrator should read and review this book BEFORE ordering his or her history textbooks. It would also be good reading for everybody else to correct misinformation they may have been taught in school. Highly recommended!

Comments from a College History Professor and former High School Teacher

I've been in the history business for over thirty years. Starting as an "educator" at the middle school and high school level. Though in short order I changed my own definition of self, saying I was a history teacher fighting against "educators" who were supremely ignorant when it came to real content knowledge of their subjects. I finally left secondary ed in disgust in the late 1980s, went back full time to grad school, got a Ph.D. in American History and went into the college classroom where at least, at my small private school, I still have intellectual freedom. I've also published a number of books on a national level, and that is how I first met one of the authors of this work when he commented on my latest book. I think I therefore have a good foundation to comment here and my comment is. . .I wish across the last thirty years I had a book like this to use in my classrooms! My own education was influenced by Beard and others like him when I was a student, and as a new teacher I taught the myths of a rather leftist perspective of our national epic. But as I matured and learned more I finally abandoned all textbook use in disgust. Anyone conversant on the subject knows my reasons, written by committees, written with a very clear bias to political correctness, outright distortions and numerous factual errors, written at times with a barely concealed disdain for our nation's story. It is made worst by alleged critics and commentators such as Loewen with his tirade "Lies my Teachers Told Me," which is riddled with factual errors and deliberate distortions, and pushes the rhetoric even further to the Left while claiming to be about getting the story right. This book, however, is like a wind stirring up after a dark storm of bias and ignorance, which tries to set the record straight on so many points. For the first time I have a history book that calls into doubt the wisdom of FDR's New Deal, the myth that he ended the Depression (when in reality the punitive taxes of up to 90% and government interference made it worst), and spawned the real beginnings of run away government. Their take on the anti war movement in the 1960s is absolutely scathing, and truthful. I was there and personally witnessed several of the events described. . . how the anti-war movement on college campuses was not an "enlightened" desire for peace, but rather a rampage gone wild, adroitly engineered by a small well trained cadre of ultra-leftists, a phenomena that still haunts our higher education system today, and has produced a generation of lies and text book distortions as well. I could cite a dozen more examples from their book that left me grinning with delight, that the truth was finally out there to read again. My only criticism, some minor factual errors, but relatively few when compared to standard textbooks, and for a monumental work of this length. I know the author's intent was simply to write an American history for the